In the summer,
Berlin is a lovely place to be. The town consists of ninety percent
woods and lakes. As the soil is of a light sandy consistency the shores
of each lake resemble seaside beaches. In summer they are dotted with
parasols and holidaymakers. Huge pleasure ships cruise from north to
south, from the Teglersee to the Wannsee. There is a corner of the Wannsee
especially reserved for dogs. In the winter the ice is thick enough
to walk on, and thousands do so. There is skating to music. The climate
of Berlin reminds one of summers and winters past in Old England. Even
I was old enough to remember such weather back home.

There is always
something interesting to do in Berlin. I bought a bicycle and spent
the sunny days riding around. It was easy to get lost in the vast woods,
so the forest rangers had put different coloured paint marks on the
trees to help orientation.

I would stop
and have a swim at a place called the Kuhhorn on the Wannsee, or in
the Teufelssee up on Teufelsberg. This small mountain was built entirely
of rubble from the terrific bombing the town received from the Allies.
Here are the ski slopes, ski jumps and a toboggan run for use in the
winter. Up on top, an American radar installation reminded us of the
cold war. The signs on the perimeter fence read:
IT IS FORBIDDEN TO PHOTOGRAPH THIS INSTALLATION. PENALTY: DM 10,000
AND 10 YEARS IN PRISON. Someone had written underneath: Welcome
to Germany.

The sun always
shines there, even in winter. The West Berliners are proud of their
town, the clean air, the clean everything, in stark contrast with what
was going on the other side of the grim Wall. (This was all written
before the Wall came down.)

When I arrived
in town in 1964 there was plenty enough going on in the music scene.
Eric Dolphy had just died in Berlin; his death causing a wave of sadness
over musicians all over the world.

The main jazz
clubs were Doug’s Night Club. the Blue Note and, later on, Herb
Geller's Jazz Gallery. On my first visit down Doug’s I met Günther Schuller,
Joe Harris, Herb Geller, Leo Wright, Francy Boland, Ack and Jerry van
Rooyen, Ernie Royal, Cannonball Adderley, J. J. Johnson, Rolf Ericson,
Joe Zawinal and Friederich Gulda. Apart from the Kenton band in Dublin,
these were the most American musicians I had ever met, in one place,
at any one time. For me it was like stepping into a dream world.

I sat at a table
with a stranger, listening to the jazz. The other man sat like a stone.
I took a peek at him in the dim light to make sure he was still alive.
He didn’t react to anything that was going on. Leo Wright joined us
when he came off the stand.

‘Hey Ronnie!
Meet Willis Conover.’

I stared in admiration.
This was the man who had fired me in my youth with his Midnight Jazz
Hour, playing records that we poor relations in England could only dream
of. Voice of America had been transmitted on long wave from a ship moored
down near Greece or Cyprus, I forget which.

I thanked him
for all the pleasure he had given me.

'Don't mention
it. Just listen to these way-out cats.'

Some of the guys,
like Ernie, Rolf, Joe, J. J. and Cannonball were in town to play a couple
of concerts with Friederich Gulda’s band. The rest of them lived in
Berlin. I hung around with Ernie Royal for a couple of days. He was
already well known to me for his work with Woody Herman’s First Herd.
Ernie was playing in that band when I was still at school.

I spoke to him
about his spectacular high trumpet solo on Woody’s great old vocal record
of ‘I Ain’t Gettin’ Any Younger’. He told me that the band had been
busy making some other titles, trying to get as much in the can before
the infamous union ban of 1946, which was due to begin at midnight.

Some of the guys
had left the studio for the canteen, thinking that the session was over,
when Woody decided to try and get ‘Younger’ in at the last moment. When
they returned it was all over. Woody had made the recording with a diminished
band.

He had to sing
live. They had one chance only, and that was when Ernie tried out his
solo for the first, and only, time. When the record came out it was
a sensation, mostly because of his solo. No one had ever heard anything
like that before, even from Pete Candoli, who usually played the screamers.

Then there was
Leo Wright. He was really a very sweet, gentle guy. Leo had already
played with Dizzy, Charlie Mingus and all the other cats back home.
He came over to Berlin in 1961, liked it, and stayed there. He had a
stroke sometime later in the 80’s, and, as I write this, I’ve just heard
from Heinz von Hermann that Leo has died in Vienna from a heart attack
at the age of 57.

All the time
I played with him Leo brought life into the band. He wasn’t originally
a lead alto player, but when he took over from Herb Geller in the band
in the radio station, he electrified everyone. He played straight out,
with the thrilling, wholly dedicated, vibrant sound that only a black
musician can get. He was loud, very loud, and tremendously exciting
to work with. He completely revolutionised the sound of that sax section.

He married three
times, and had a couple of daughters from his first marriage with whom
he could only converse in German, as they had been born in Germany and
now went to school in Frankfurt. Leo had an infectious smile, which
made him look like Ernest Borgnine, and an even more infectious laugh.
He certainly had no problems finding women, and, when he had one, he
was fiercely loyal to her.

To my knowledge,
Leo only went back to the States once, all the time he was in Berlin.
He was scared of all the race rioting going on.

‘I just got on
the Greyhound bus to Wichita Falls, got my ass down on the seat with
my head beneath the window, and man, I just stayed there until I got
home. I ain’t never goin’ back there again.’

While he was
there someone told him a joke which he repeated to me.

When the very
first astronaut returned to earth he was asked what it was like up there.

‘It was great,
marvellous.’

‘And did you
see God?’

‘Yeah man, I
saw God, and she was black.’

Leo’s other joke
was stolen from the comedian Redd Foxx. ‘I ain’t racial prejudiced,
nothin’ like that, but if you see a ghost, cut it.’ Luckily for him,
now away from it all, he was able to to make fun of the disgraceful
American race problem.

Playing in the
club that night was the Swedish trombone player Åke (pronounced Aw-key)
Persson. Åke was a big, clean, good-looking, elegantly dressed Swede,
with a dent in his chin like Kirk Douglas. He had been playing some
gigs with Quincy Jones up in Stockholm, and some of the cats in the
band had told him there was more happening in Berlin. I couldn’t fault
that. There was more going on in that one jazz club than was happening
in the whole of London.

On bass with
Åke was a Hungarian with an enormous beard, called Aladar Pege. He kept
the whole joint amused with his playing, which mostly consisted of fierce
runs up and down the finger board, interspersed with some very solid
rhythm.

Coming out of
the club that night I saw a man lying in the gutter. I wasn’t keen on
getting too close. He could have been drunk, dead, or demented, for
all I knew. But it was Åke, with his arm buried up to the shoulder in
all the filth of the open drain, trying to fish out his car keys. I
drove him home. Thus began a friendship which lasted for the next twenty
years.

I took the job
on lead with the Radio Free Berlin band, known to the Germans as Sender
Freies Berlin, or SFB. Herb Geller was lead alto, Joe Harris on drums,
and Ack van Rooyen took the jazz trumpet solos. The rest of the line-up
of five trumpets, four trombones, five saxes and rhythm were pretty
poor. Jerry van Rooyen was the bandleader and I stayed with him until
I could get a place to live.

The first trombonist
in the band, Henry Masnick, had an enormous lump on the side of his
neck.

I saw Henry again
ten years later when he came to Saarbrücken on a gig. The lump had now
disappeared. He told me that he’d finally gone to have it removed. Afterwards
the analysis showed that the lump had been, in fact, his unborn twin
brother. That gave me the horrors, I can tell you. Now you never know
what you’ve been carrying around inside you all these years...

The saxes in
the Berlin band, apart from Herb Geller, were nondescript, while the
only trumpet player worthy of note was the bandleader Jerry van Rooyen’s
brother, Ack. Only the rhythm section was passable, mainly due to the
presence of Joe Harris, who had formerly played with Miles Davis.

Once again I
was amazed at the way the German musicians phrased and interpreted dance
music. They listened to the same records as their British and American
contemporaries, played daily side by side with many of them, yet, when
left alone, they played and phrased as if they were in the fire brigade
or a military band. Many Germans attributed this to having been taught
in military bands, but many brilliant British brass players had emerged
from such bands. There were fierce discussions about phrasing, and where
the beat should fall. I kept out of them, but when they did manage to
drag me into such arguments it was only to be told that I was wrong.

Åke Persson left
no one in doubt what he thought about all this. Sitting in a Berlin
studio one day he was playing a nondescript solo for some pop arranger
when the guy stopped the recording and rushed into the studio waving
his arms.

‘No, no no!’
he said. ‘You have to feel it! Feel it!’

‘When I play
this music,’ said Åke, ‘I feel nothing.’

The drummer Kurt Giese has added
the following to the Åke Persson folklore.

Kurt was playing a concert for Berlin
children, to show that there is rather more to music than rock and pop.
There were various bands on the event: a Dixieland outfit, a bebop group,
a jazz-rock band and a Free Jazz Group.

Åke was standing at the bar,
listening. The Free Jazz Group must have fancied themselves, because
they went well over their allotted time When they finally finished the
leader made his way through the crowd. As he passed the bar Äke
stopped him, very politely introduced himself, and asked if a question
was permitted.

The leader, knowing Åke by
name, but not by reputation, seemed to be very pleased at having caught
the attention of a jazz player of Åke's status, and said he would
indeed love to answer it.

So Åke said, How come you
played only shit for forty-five minutes?

Herb Geller had
been a side-man in Los Angeles. He’d been on all the bands there, Stan
Kenton, Terry Gibbs, Shorty Rogers, Bill Holman, and various small groups.

Herb moved later
on to Hamburg and took a resident job, with a pension, in the NDR radio
band. He always intended returning to Los Angeles, though. Meanwhile,
back home in LA, the session world had become almost viciously competitive,
especially for sax players. They were now expected to play many other
woodwind instruments.

Herb bought himself
all the flutes—piccolo, C flute, alto and bass flutes, oboe, cor anglais
and bassoon. He practised them all until he could give a virtuoso performance
on each and every one. His house was full of instrument cases, stored
in every room. You couldn’t move without falling over them.

Finally, when
he thought that he was ready, he took his wife, his daughter, and eleven
instruments, made up of the woodwinds, plus soprano, alto, tenor and
baritone saxophones, and flew back to Los Angeles.

But LA had changed
too much in his absence. Neither of them liked it any more. Back they
came to Hamburg, and there they’ve remained. I had the same experience
with London. After the cleanliness and order of Germany, and the friendliness
and correct behaviour of the Germans, London is like a savage jungle
to me now.

This is not to
say that I love all Germans by any means. Some of the older ones haven't
changed with the times, but the younger generation is OK, and, generally
speaking, I feel safer in Germany than I have ever felt anywhere else
in the world.

The resident
star trumpet player in Berlin was Horst Fischer, a man famous in Germany
for his sweet trumpet solos. He worked for the Werner Müller band over
in RIAS (Radio in the American Sector),

Horst was a day-and-night
alcoholic, and carried a Fahne around with him. This was a cloud of
gas consisting of pure alcohol which floated around him at all times
for several metres. A struck match would have blown him to smithereens.

He came in, supported
by the others, demanding to meet the new foreign trumpeter in town.
Having glared at me suspiciously for several minutes without speaking
he then demanded to see my trumpet. He waggled the valves fiercely a
few times, shouting, ‘SCHEISS MASCHINE! SCHEISS MASCHINE!’ (i.e., rotten
valves) and fell heavily to the floor unconscious. As they carried him
out he revived sufficiently to yell, ‘I’ll drive! I’ll drive! It’s my
car!’

I’ve often wondered
what it must have been like for his wife and children to live with someone
who was stupidly drunk every day.

On rare occasions
when he was sober we conversed, and I discovered that he was quite a
pleasant person.

Horst moved to
Cologne to work with Kurt Edelhagen. From Berlin he had to sail his
yacht through all kinds of complicated waterways to reach the Rhine.
Once there it was drydocked for a propellor repair. The shaft wasn’t
sealed properly afterwards, so that when the boat was winched back into
the water it sank immediately. Horst stood on board, dressed in his
captain’s uniform, stoned right up to the eyeballs, saluting with an
inane grin on his face as the waters of the Rhine slowly closed over
his head.

He then took
a job in the radio station orchestra in Zurich, and almost at once received
a year’s jail sentence for punching a policeman. After that he was deported.
The last I heard of Horst he was supposed to have swum across Lake Constance
to Friedrichshafen to re-enter Switzerland illegally. I doubt whether
this was true. He was hardly ever in a fit state to walk, never mind
swim.

Sender Freies
Berlin was the main transmitter for Berlin during the war. It is built
like a giant doughnut, four stories high. If you walk in any direction
in any one of the corridors, you eventually arrive back at your starting
point. The centre of the foyer is open, so that it is possible to look
right up to the roof. At Christmas a giant fir tree arrives from Norway
and is erected in this area. The world-famous Schöneberg Children’s
Choir comes to sing carols during Christmas week. Lined up around the
first floor balcony, they sing softly into the huge circular open space.
Standing below, by the tree, one cannot see them. The incredible, heavenly
effect of this arrangement, and the sound of their beautiful voices,
is magical, and always made me feel desperately homesick.

There was a paternoster
going up and down to the canteen which passed through all floors. The
first time I met Oliver Nelson he was com­ing up to the ground floor
on it, which meant that he’d gone down too far and had travelled in
total dark­ness around in the bottom of the shaft to come up again.
I did it once. It was spooky as hell and you didn’t really know what
was going to happen to you down there. A real horror trip.

He got out quick,
a little paler than usual.

‘Man, I thought
I was on my way then, right down to hell.’

The whole area
near the Wall was a bomb-ruined landscape. Some of the recording studios
were in burned-out buildings right up against the Berlin Wall. A couple
of the rooms in one ruin had been renovated to make the Ariola studio,
the rest of the place had been untouched since the end of the war. Opposite
were the burned-out remains of Haus Vaterland, once the very centre
of entertainment in pre-war Berlin. The tram lines running up the centre
of the road end abruptly in the wall of shame, Der Schandenmauer. No
one wanted to live near the grim wall, with its little plaques commemorating
those who have been shot trying to escape. Walking around the area,
and into the nearby Potsdamerplatz, with all its historic connections,
was an eery experience, and there was the added danger of being shot
by mistake if someone decided to try and cross over from the east while
you were in the area.

The Philips studio
was around the corner in the Hotel Esplanade. In the interval between
recordings the porter, who also sold coffee and cakes to the musicians,
used take us through the deserted Grand Ballroom, scene of many regal
receptions in days gone by, and show a porno film in one of the bedrooms
for four marks a head.

When the lights
came on after, it was to reveal that we had all dropped off to sleep
during the film.

Here, in the
shadow of the Wall, we made all the soundtracks for Peter Alexander,
the Kessler twins and Vicky Leandros, the Greek pop star. These were
all very big name performers on German television. I also recorded the
tricky high trumpet solo from the Beatles’ number Penny Lane for the
German version, and several similar feats of pyrotechnics for Caterina
Valente. Penny
Lane solo

I was booked
to play a midnight concert with Sammy Davis Junior, in aid of Israel.
He had brought the son of Reynauld Jones along to play lead trumpet.
Reynauld was the first trumpet player with Count Basie who had caused
a sensation when we saw the band in London by sitting on the end of
the trumpet section, playing the lead one-handed. Sitting on the end
was an unheard of practice at the time for a first trumpet player, but
something which I personally was forced to do in most BBC studios, because
I used to overblow the old Marconi microphones so much that no one else
could be heard. Reynauld had told me privately that he only sat there
because the chair next to the drums was the only one vacant when he
joined the Basie band.

The one-handed
style caused a lot of trouble in London because a lot of players at
once adopted the attitude, thinking it was hip. Mostly they messed up
pretty badly, until the infuriated bandleaders forbade the practice.
I don’t know why Reynauld used to do it. Maybe he had broken his other
arm at some time or other.

On the Sammy
Davis rehearsal Reynauld’s son played so quietly that we couldn’t hear
him. He explained that he was saving his chops for the performance.
On the show we still couldn’t hear him.

Sammy Davis did
the lot on his show, miming Robert Mitchum, Duke Wayne, and Jimmy Cagney,
ending up with his famous West Side Story medley, sung only with a bongo
accompaniment. The Jewish Berlin audience loved Sammy.

Another night
I was booked suddenly to play in a large tent pitched in a car park
behind the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church. There was no time to rehearse. It
was a big session band, and we played everything at sight. Only when
the show began did I realise that we were accompanying Josephine Baker,
doing yet another charity concert. Her performance was breathtaking.
I had done a similar, one-off, performance in the Albert Hall once with
Billy Holliday, one of her last appearances before her untimely death.

The radio band
was really no good until Paul Kuhn came in as bandleader and got rid
of all the dead wood. Paul was a pianist/singer/arranger who had made
himself famous on German TV by singing silly songs like There’s No Beer
in Hawaii, and playing around with violinist Svend Asmussen and Jonny
Tulpin, the harpist in Cologne. He was also great pals with a couple
of famous television drunks called Bully Buhlan and Harald Juhnke. As
a well established dumb loser Jerry Lewis type television star he was
useful to the boss of our TV company.

As if by magic,
good players started to arrive in the band. Leo Wright came in on lead
alto, Phillip Catherine on guitar, Charles Orieux on bass trombone,
Carmel Jones on trumpet, and the Austrian Heinz von Hermann on tenor.
I was supposed to be the official lead trumpet, but Paul brought in
his friend from Kurt Edelhagen’s band as well, the Yugoslav Milo Pavlovic.
I was delighted, because some of the work we were doing was just too
much for one man to play. In fact Milo took over almost everything,
which left me very little to do, a nice change for me.

Milo was a large
well-fed man with an enormous black beard. He was an extremely good
trumpet player, with an awesome range and one of the the most beautiful
big sounds on trumpet that I have ever heard, especially on his sweet
solos. Milo moved around slowly and gravely, like a king. When he spoke
it was in weighty, measured Winston-Churchill-like tones. When he ate
he usually ordered two meals, a steak perhaps, with a goulash on the
side, in case he felt hungry afterwards. His obesity caused his legs
to swell up alarmingly, and gave him gout, which was probably the reason
for his majesterial gait.

Milo was a chess
master. Now I had studied chess for many years, and reckoned myself
to be not half bad at the game. When I played Milo he would anger me
right at the beginning by pointing at a square on the board and saying,
‘This is where I will win.’

Later in the
game, after a series of cunning and devious stratagems I would have
him trapped and helpless. Looking up in triumph I would discover Milo
looking at me in grave amusement.

‘And now,’ he’d
say, ‘I’m going to smash you.’ He then proceeded to do so, right on
the square he’d pointed out earlier.

Milo was so good
that he could probably have made a career of it. There was a weekly
chess club in the SFB canteen and I went in there once to try my luck.
One evening, as we sat there during an interval from recording, he said
he was going in there.

Twenty minutes
later he strolled out again.

'How did you
get on?' I asked.

'I smashed them,'
he replied.

He travelled
up to Reykjavik in 1972 to see the Fischer/Spassky match. Once there
he ensconced himself in the restaurant, in front of a large TV set,
and watched the games from there. When I pointed out that we had been
able to do exactly the same thing with our sets at home he spoke at
length of the atmosphere of the place—of the thrill of actually being
there. I don’t believe that he even caught a glimpse of Fischer.

In spite of his
talents Milo was rarely booked on sessions in Berlin. When the radio
band finally broke up he tried his hand at bandleading. During the break-up
he fell out with Paul Kuhn so badly that Paul then made it clear that
any musician in Germany working for Milo would never be employed in
his band. This meant that Milo could now only have a band if he booked
English musicians, which he did, from then on.

Milo and I got
on fine, and Åke was more than pleased when Slide Hampton joined the
band. His only problem was with the Frenchman Charles Orieux, who was
on bass trombone.

Charles wore
glasses with a lens as thick as the bottom of a bottle of Schnaps. To
read music he put another pair on top of them with even thicker lenses,
so that his glasses stuck out like a pair of binoculars attached to
his head.

With all that
glass to peer through he attained real time tunnel vision. He could
only see a little bit of the part at once, and the mechanism of the
bass trombone forced him to keep the music way over on the right of
the music stand. This meant him stopping playing at the end of each
page to turn the part, whereas everyone else could read the opened-out
double sheets right off.

His stopping
playing like that used to infuriate Åke, and he started nudging Charles’s
stand at the changeovers, to try and make the music fall off on to the
floor. Charles would get his knee up to prevent this, and, to the rest
of us, it looked like a leg-wrestling match between paraplegics.

Later on the
trombones were joined by Torolf Molgaard, from the Danish Radio Band,
and the Parisian Andre Paquinet. Torolf was a wonderfully gifted soloist
and later on, when he moved to the Frankfurt Radio Band, he recorded
many titles with an eight-piece (at times even twelve-piece) trombone
group he formed, and for which I wrote a great many titles.

Carmel Jones
had made a name for himself on a recording he made with Gerald Wilson's
band back in the United States. He had the most gorgeous tone on trumpet
one could imagine and played sentitive, soulful jazz. For some reason
the critic Steve Race repeatedly called him the 'poor-toned Carmel Jones'
in his Crescendo reviews, which probably damned him somewhat in Britain.
Those of us lucky enough to work with him every day knew better.

Slide, Leo Wright,
and Carmel gave that band a whole lot of class, something that no other
radio band in Germany has ever had, or ever will have.

Francy Boland
was a very quiet guy. He was a brilliant arranger, but if you met him
anywhere he was very shy and retiring. He had a contract with a guy
in Cologne called Gigi Campi who owned an ice-cream parlour to make
those great Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland records of the 1960’s. When the
contract ended he never appeared again with the band. A lot of the guys
went into Peter Herbolzheimer’s band after that.

Milo had married
Gigi’s sister during the time he was in Cologne with Edelhagen. The
Campi family disowned her for not marrying an Italian, only welcoming
her back in after they divorced.

One of the arrangers
for the band in Berlin was the Scottish trumpet player Jimmy Deuchar.
I’d played with Jimmy, of course, in Jack Parnell’s band back in 1953,
and he’d been a great arranger even then.

Later on, Kurt
Edelhagen had contracted Jimmy, with Derek Humble and Ken Wray to join
his band in Cologne.

Milo had played
lead trumpet there at the time, and he told me of all the troubles Edelhagen
had with the trio. Of course they had troubles, just as I had with Max
Greger. British players just won’t put up with all the nonsense that
goes on in the German bands.

Jimmy got fed up and left after a few
years and went back to live in his home town of Dundee.

The Edelhagen
band had to be great, with all those guys in it. Derek was probably
the finest lead alto player in the world at the time. But Edelhagen
cheated his musicians badly. Most of them had left the pensionable job
in the radio station in Baden-Baden to go with him to Cologne, where
they had been promised a similar deal. More than twenty years later,
when Edelhagen died and the band broke up, they were still only employed
on a temporary basis, which meant that the band suddenly ceased to exist.

The Edelhagen
band was contracted to provide the music for the German Olympic Games,
held in the new Munich stadium in 1970. The music was written by the
team of Peter Herbolzheimer, Jerry van Rooyen, and the pianist Dieter
Reith, and it was sensational, so much so that Edelhagen and the three
arrangers were awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz—the highest honour a
German civilian can attain.

My first apartment
in the Kurfürstendamm belonged to a tennis teacher called Werner Gebbers.
This guy owned a Tennisplatz behind the apartment block, where Joe Harris
used to win the tournament cups. I played tennis there with Äke a lot.
I enjoyed the game, laughing and cracking jokes all the time, pretty
carefree.

Åke never looked
happy, playing each shot with grim determination, taking lessons, and
practising in his spare time. I stopped going there with him when I
discovered that his only reason for playing was to get good enough to
win the tennis cup away from Joe. He couldn’t stand being beaten at
anything by anyone.

In winter Werner
taught ice skating in Garmisch. That’s how I managed to rent the apartment
for three or four months.

He had the place
all done up like a brothel, with mirrors over the bed, and red lights
all above and around it, silk hangings, satin sheets, several sexy nightdresses
in the wardrobe, the lot. There was a photograph of him with his arm
around James Mason, with Thanks Werner written across it. He’d apparently
been contracted to teach Mason to skate for some film or other in the
past.

I spotted an
old sixteen millimetre film projector at the back of a cupboard, and
several cans of film. One evening, at a loose end, I threaded it up
and switched on.

The films contained
several hours of close-ups of Adolf Hitler. The cameraman, obviously
Werner himself, must have been by the Führer’s side constantly. The
films seemed to have been taken late in the war, because Hitler looked
exhausted. There were no scenes of a jubilant population giving the
Hitler Salute, just country roads, seemingly endless Autobahns and mountain
scenes. Eva Braun was with him sometimes, and his Alsation dog. They
were all intimate shots, obviously for Hitler’s private collection.
On some of the reels made in Berchtesgaden you could see Martin Borman,
and, now and again, Albert Speer. Nobody was doing much smiling. When
the war ended suddenly Werner had kept the films.

It was pretty weird, sitting there alone
in the dark, with all that stuff going off on the screen. I actually
felt scared some of the time, as if the Gestapo were liable to burst
in on me at any moment. I never told anyone about the films. There were
still some things that it was better not to discuss in Germany.